


The Treachery of Images (The Mirror Remix)

by SegaBarrett



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 03:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12004353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Ed isn't sure what he wants anymore.





	The Treachery of Images (The Mirror Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [May](https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Happy Endings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713513) by [May](https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May). 



> Disclaimer: I don't own Gotham, and I make no money from this.

_I wish she could be._ Ed doesn’t allow himself to finish that thought, but it lingers every time he wakes up and rolls over in the morning.

It’s as if he had returned to his apartment but realized, touch by touch by sound by smell, that something was wrong, that someone had come in while he was gone and rearranged everything to try and drive him insane. 

And he wonders, sometimes, if that wasn’t the plan here. What are the chances of a woman with his dead girlfriend’s face wandering into his life with a bottle of wine, really? Maybe it was some kind of cosmic joke by whoever designed these kind of things – whoever that was, he or she was a bigger villain than him.

There was a painting that had been done by Magritte, a painting of a pipe that had, in French, the statement that “This is not a pipe.”

Ed hadn’t really understood it at first, when he had seen it in school (art class, always a yawn for Ed, but he’d paid attention, because it was vital to pay attention) but he’d been intrigued by the riddle of it all. Then it had hit him, the point that was being made – it was not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe.

A facsimile of an image, yet not the thing itself. Not truly. 

He tries to tell himself that Isabella was beautiful in her own right and that looking like Kristen was just an added bonus. That that was what had drawn him in initially, but that there is a list of things to keep him.

And she tries, of course – he watches her try. And it confuses him until it frustrates him and then infuriates him. 

Which is odd, as Kristen hadn’t liked him much. Not until he had changed, after all. Not until he had shown that he could become someone else, and by then it had been too late. 

He had been wearing another person’s face. He had been Isabella, then.

It had been lonely. He can understand…

So why is he crawling out of his skin?

***

She’s wearing Kristen’s glasses. No, not Kristen’s glasses; her glasses. 

Her glasses that make her into that faux-Kristen, the one who shouldn’t be here. The “evil twin”, maybe. A phantom, a dream that Ed shouldn’t have anymore.  
Maybe Oswald was right. 

Ed had walked back into the apartment. He feels tired, the kind of tired that only envelopes a person after they’ve been fighting off pain (or maybe that isn’t quite it, but pressure no doubt, strain, some kind of crushing force that feels as if it starts at his ribcage and has worked its way down to his thighs). He has run out of reasons to stay after in the mayor’s office, has run out of paperwork to remember to file, has run out of excuses and now he is back home where he lives, but it is also where she lives.

When did she start living here? 

He walks into the bathroom and notices a shadow against the hanging towel.

A centipede.

He swats at it, wishing it away, out of his life. This place should be cleaner. He’s fastidious at cleaning, isn’t he? 

At keeping things out of his life that don’t belong there.

“How was your day?” Isabella calls, and Ed wants to scream that there is a goddamned centipede in here and it’s all her fault. But that isn’t logical, of course it isn’t. He has to be logical. 

So he tells her that his day was fine.

***

He can picture the water running red as he lets it run through his hair, the red becoming the red of Miss Kringle’s hair. Kristen. What is her name anymore? Her face is blurry in his mind, but he can still feel the way her blood vessels had folded against the squeeze of his hands.

He’d never thought of himself as having strong hands, before.

She’s outside, waiting for him to say something to her, something comforting. He’d hurt her, and it had been an accident, sure, but hadn’t it been that he could never hurt her? Hadn’t that been the point? 

He can still see her rubbing at her eye, crying, and he hates that he hates it. 

Won’t she just go away already? She isn’t Kristen, she never will be.

Hell, even Kristen hadn’t really been Kristen, in the end. She had simply been an image of what Ed had wanted her to be, someone to love him, whatever the hell that meant.

Someone to laugh at his riddles and to smile when he walked into the room. 

He’s finding that that isn’t what he wants anymore.

***

He stands by the elevated train, the place he had made his first kill. The gentle hum of the train is soothing – people going about their lives, their boring lives.

Their riddled, boring lives. 

Maybe he isn’t meant to be in love, and maybe he needs to learn to live with that. Hadn’t he told Penguin that to be without love was to be truly free? Perhaps it just isn’t worth it, a price that one day no one would be willing to pay.

All of these people walking around with all the wrong faces. 

Maybe he can climb up the metal structure, climb into the train and ride away. Start over somewhere else. He’d have a new name, then – he could start from scratch. 

Who would he be, though? Which face would he wear in this new town?

***

There are little pieces of her everywhere, little wisps of blonde hair and red, caught in the deadbolt and scattered in the bathroom sink. Little reminders. 

She’d left a book in the bathroom; Othello. Dreaming up a future in which they tumbled down together into the pit of death, no doubt.

What is it about him, he wonders, what could it be?

He curls a blonde strand around his finger and lets out a sigh. She is working. 

He only misses her, these days, when she’s gone.

***

“Ed! Pay attention.”

Ed lifts his gaze to note Mayor Copplepot standing beside his desk with a scowl on his face and a hand on his hip. 

“Daydreaming about Isabella again?” he inquires. “Ed, I didn’t hire you to sit around thinking about girls all day. I hired you to help me run this city! If you’re not interested… then… then… maybe we should do something about that, then! I could always eliminate the object of distraction the way you did before!”

He remembers the way she’d let him put his hands around her throat, the way she had guided them there. He feels nothing. 

“I need to go home.”

“You had better, Ed, because you are not contributing anything! I have half a mind to go over there and…”

Ed has half a mind to let him. What had he felt, once upon a time?

When had Isabella’s stories crumpled at both of their feet, and what is there to do about it?

Maybe Ed can take off his glasses, shake out his hair, and scare her away.

***

“This isn’t working.” He says it into his bedroom mirror, wondering if Kristen will pop up and made another appearance. Maybe she’ll tell him that this is all wrong, that of course this won’t work, because it had been Kristen he had loved so much he had to destroy. Only Kristen.

He only sees his face staring back at him, grinning.

“Maybe you’ll love her when you kill her, too.”

The doorbell is ringing so loudly that his head is ringing. She is knocking. 

“Ed? Are you in there?”

In the mirror, Ed begins to laugh.

In his hands he clenches a metal bat.

But he doesn’t yet know who he will swing it at. That will be a riddle he’ll find out the answer to, shortly. Three, two, one…

He can’t stop laughing.


End file.
